YouTube Shorts crosses TikTok in views as the views of Youtube shorts reaches to 1.5 billion.
“It’s the biggest opportunity for YouTube creators or YouTube wannabes in the past five years,” said Eyal Baumel, who represents several top online creators.
“I’ve worked with YouTube for eight years, and I’ve never seen them so eager to promote a new product.” YouTube Shorts cross TikTok.
For years, the British teen continued to post only sparingly on YouTube.
Then in early 2021, the service introduced YouTube Shorts, a new feature showcasing videos that are less than a minute long.
Rhodes embraced it, and within two weeks his YouTube subscribers jumped from 17,000 to over a million.
The 17-year-old magician now has 3.8 million subscribers, and his videos have been viewed 3.2 billion times.
Along the way, Rhodes has become an embodiment of the overnight success that YouTube executives had in mind when they created Shorts.
It’s the kind of sudden fame the site hasn’t routinely bestowed on up-and-coming creators for the past half decade or so. YouTube Shorts crossed TikTok’s record with its popularity.
Shorts is YouTube’s answer to ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok.
That service has been wooing YouTube’s young audience, challenging its role as the primary platform for aspiring amateurs and inspiring copycat features from major social media networks, including Snapchat and Facebook’s Instagram.
While YouTube is still the king of web video, its gargantuan size can be intimidating to newbies, many of whom see TikTok as a faster path to fame. YouTube Shorts cross TikTok.
YouTube, part of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, launched Shorts in the fall of 2020 in India, where TikTok is banned, and took it global in March.
Users can access the feature via a prominent tab on the YouTube mobile app and cycle through an endless stream of videos by swiping up.
To date, YouTube has kept Shorts inside its main service but is aiming to release custom features that will make editing and posting videos simpler.
Later this summer, backed with a new $100 million fund, YouTube plans to begin paying Shorts creators based on new metrics of video engagement — a departure from YouTube’s traditional advertising model.
Officials say that, at some point, the company may begin running ads within Shorts, but it won’t compensate the creators based on the commercials that appear with their clips like YouTube does for regular videos.
“It’s almost like we’re building YouTube again,” said Todd Sherman, a product manager for Shorts. YouTube Shorts crosses TikTok in views.
In some ways, YouTube is going back to its roots. Founded in 2005, the site first took off with brief, viral clips. But over time, as it struggled to become profitable and became inundated with crummy clickbait, YouTube shifted its algorithmic gears.
In 2012, YouTube began prioritizing the amount of time that any particular video engaged its viewers — the longer, the better.
In the years that followed, the company pushed its creators to make longer material with higher production values to better compete with television, where most advertising dollars were still being spent.
Eventually, most YouTube hits settled somewhere in the 10-to-20-minute range, and YouTube grew into a formidable business with $20 billion in annual advertising revenue.
While YouTube focused on making its site more professional, rivals breathed new life into the genre of short-form videos.
TikTok, in particular, minted a new class of celebrity video producers who regularly make songs go viral and who have helped turn the service into the the fastest-growing social media app.
Recently, TikTok has been revving up its advertising business, adding another front in the competition with YouTube. YouTube Shorts crosses TikTok in views.
